Fig. 5.

Model-predicted tradeoffs between gel layer thickness and fractional area coated in determining the time to threshold for numbers of virions transported from semen to the vaginal surface [26]. Computation is for a consolidated two-bin model, i.e., the epithelial surface has two regions, one coated by gel and one not coated, cf. [26]. For the imaging data given in the Lai et al. study [26], it has been shown that times to threshold predicted by this two-bin model are relatively close to those of the original computations, provided the height of the gel coating is the harmonic mean of the coating thickness distribution obtained from imaging, and the ϕ value is equal to that obtained from imaging [29]